Americans’ anger with Congress has been re-lit by the Capitol’s recent debt-ceiling fiasco. Less than a year after the anti- incumbent 2010 election, throw-the- bums-out rhetoric is heating up again. Political thinkers and regular folk alike are arguing in online and print forums that we can put things right in Washington by imposing term limits on the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Californians might advise our 49 neighbors not to get their hopes up.

Twenty years’ experience has taught people here that term limits are not a panacea for an ailing government, which is why there’s a new movement to relax the restrictions.

Voters approved term limits for Sacramento in 1990 – three two-year terms for Assembly members, two four-year terms for state senators. The idea was to replace corrupt and inflexible career politicians with clear-eyed citizen legislators. The new men and women would bring their real-world savvy to the Capitol, solve the problems of the citizenry as quickly as possible, and then leave government to the next class of pure hearts.

Whether it’s because of term limits, despite term limits or the fault of other factors, the ensuing generation has not been a political paradise. On-time state budgets have been notoriously rare – as is bipartisan compromise. The California Legislature is as unpopular as, well, Congress.

And a recent report shows that California’s elected officials in the era of term limits do not go back to private life when their time is up. Just as often as before, they seek new elected offices or government appointments. Also, new state legislators now are more likely to come from city councils and other local offices. In other words, career pols are still with us, and they’re as distracted as ever by plans for the next campaign.

Term-limits advocates saw the debt-ceiling episode as another example of the need to sweep away ineffectual congressional veterans.

But term-limits skeptics correctly note that blame for the failure to agree on deeper deficit cuts – or to agree on anything walking the country to the brink of default – lies as much with congressional newcomers whose contribution to a compromise was to flatly oppose any kind of tax increase.

Now comes a new effort to polish the state’s two-decades-old term-limits system through an initiative on the June 2012 California ballot.

Under this proposed amendment to the state constitution, the limit on legislative service would shrink from 14 years to 12. But instead of a limit of six years in the Assembly and eight in the Senate, someone could serve a total of 12 in either house (or a combination of houses).

Californians should support this change. It’s a way to let constituents keep a popular representative in the same seat and benefit from his or her experience a little longer, without losing the basic message of term limits, that political office is not a lifetime appointment.